LORO MAST D: Paolo Sorrentino, Italy. 150 min. Sep 6, 9:15 pm, Elgin; Sep 7, 9 am, TBLB 2; Sep 14, 9:45 pm, Scotiabank 2. See listing. Rating: NN
You can feel the contemporary resonances in Sorrentino’s film about Italy’s boisterous prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. He complains about the constant media attacks with Trumpian paranoia. And like the current U.S. president, he parlays his political power into massive profit. Watch how he goes the distance to assist an elderly survivor of a natural disaster, just like how Rob Ford used to manage his constituency. Like Ford, he’s a party animal and a populist.
Played by Sorrentino’s personal muse, Toni Servillo (sporting a ton of hair dye), he even has some sympathetic moments, as when a 20-year-old turns down his advances because he’s too old. It’s 2006 and even though his political career is not yet over, you get the clear sense that the man is in decline. So is his marriage to Veronika (Elena Sofia Ricci), even though you can feel the affection between them.
All this would be fascinating but we have to wait an hour before Berlusconi hits the screen. The film is less biopic than an exploration of the social landscape he climbed and the hangers-on who ache to be in his presence. Chief among them is Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio) who runs an escort service and snorts copious amounts of cocaine. Sergio finally gets an in via Kira (a mesmerizing Kasia Smutniak), who suggests he rent the villa opposite Berlusconi’s home and reel in his target via a mammoth, highly visible party.
Scenes of nubile naked women dancing, stroking each other (thanks to ecstasy) and making a spectacle of themselves make up more than a half hour of the film, and it’s way too much. I thought the party sequences in The Wolf Of Wall Street were just fine, thank you, but Loro's give new meaning to the word gratuitous.
Loro has the right indie soundtrack and Luca Bigazzi’s startling cinematography, including a longtracking shot over the final credits that speaks volumes about class divisions. But whereas The Great Beauty has several thematic threads commenting on the church, cosmetic surgeries and how a gifted writer can waste his talent, Loro, for most of the film, has a one-note quality.
It's bold, wildly profane and some of the images are spectacular – but it doesn’t work.